Because, you see, Jeffrey Loria is an independently wealthy and clandestine social scientist, and the people of Florida are his test subjects. He builds them up, and then breaks them down, all the while keeping detailed notes on his observations and results. Loria watches the baseball team in Florida, they win the Wold Series. There is elation. The team is then gutted. There is sorrow. Loria sees this and acquires the team, abandoning his previous social experiment in Montreal for more fertile territory. Loria hammers revenue sharing checks for a while, and then wins the World Series again. Remembering what he has learned from his forebearers, the team is once again gutted, and more monies are pocketed. Lows and highs. Highs and lows. Loria giveth and Loria taketh away. Loria observe the emotional turmoil of the turnstiled masses and Loria make record his findings.

Heath Bell has been all yappin’ and stuff and then Ozzie Guillen has been all yappin’ and stuff and then the sports media has been yappin’ about said yappin’ and then smartasses on the internet have been yappin’ about the yappin’ about the yappin’. This is how the world works and how things will be forever until the end of time.

On the most recent edition of FanGraphs Audio, Dayn Perry, as he’s wont to do, offered up some sports opinions about this matter. They were both literally and figuratively hot as the undying fires of hell. There was also boiling oil involved, which, I imagine, is quite warm. Scalding, even. Dayn Perry, he said the words that make up the title of this post. Dayn Perry, he said “HEATH BELL NEEDS TO SHUT UP, OR BE BOILED IN OIL!”

In what is quickly becoming a new and very pathetic tradition, I’ve taken the liberty of Photoshopping together a picture of Heath Bell being boiled in oil. This proves that I know how to use the copy and paste functions on my computer, as well the layering properties of Photoshop, and also the polygonal lasso and eraser tools. And the clone stamp, too.

For a decent portion of my childhood there was the head of a deer hanging in my living room. I currently have some antlers hanging in my very own adult apartment. All this is to say that I grew up in the woods and so I have a weird affinity for camouflage. Do with that information what you will. It was not very elegantly rendered. On the topic of camouflage—yes, this is what I was trying to get to—my latest post at Call to the Pen is about the baseball hats that all the professional baseball players will be wearing this Memorial Day. They have camouflage on them, have I not made that clear? Some look kind of cool and some look kind of not cool. Some are the orange Miami Marlins hat with camouflage inside the multicolored logo.

Coco Crisp is a confident guy. I guess you’d have to be with that name. He was asked Tuesday while on a phone interview about the Oakland Athletic’s recent acquisition of Cuban workout master and vowel enthusiast Yoenis Cespedes. Cespedes plays defense in the outfield and is well regarded as an athlete and gloveman. Crisp had this to say:

“I’m going to make all the plays. If someone feels there’s someone better than me, it’s hard for me to believe. Unless he’s a demigod come down from the heavens, no one is going to outshine me in center field.”

He may have a point. Crisp is known to be an above-average defender both by reputation and statistics. He’s getting older, with some of his swiftness of foot perhaps waning, but the longtime center fielder certainly isn’t out of line to suggest the spot is his to lose.

The pertinent question then becomes: Is Yoenis Cespedes, as Crisp says, a demigod come down from the heavens? The facts seem to point towards “Yes.”

Yoenis Cespedes’ father was a god. His mother was a human.

Yoenis Cespedes is a human-god hybrid.

Yoenis Cespedes is tight with the Sumerian king Gilgamesh.

Yoenis Cespedes is stronger, braver, and quicker than other mortals.

Yoenis Cespedes is able to accomplish super-human feats as a consequence of his divine lineage.

I have to imagine that at least one of you currently reading this blog is an independently wealthy celebrity hair collector with eleven or so grand burning a hole in your pocket. That being the case, you are in fucking luck my friend, because there’s still a few hours left for you to bid on some smelly old dreadlocks previously attached to the skull of Miami Marlins shortstop Jose Reyes. At the time of this writing, there’s less than four hours left in the auction and the current bid is the paltry sum of $10,200.00, meaning that whoever ends up with this plastic sack of aged, purposefully unwashed and greasy hair bits is going to have an old-fashioned, All-American, bona fide bargain on their hands. Frankly, at this price, you can’t afford not to bid on this old dead hair that belonged to a famous stranger who is good at the sport of baseball. I’ll be honest, without proper photographic evidence, I’m a bit skeptical as to the veracity of the auction, so I’ve included a picture of Reyes post haircut and sans dreadlocks to hopefully assuage any trepidation you may be feeling. The picture has been lifted from television, so you know it’s 100% authentic and true. Not to mention, there’s that little ribbon next to the title of the listing, so that has to mean it’s legit. And wait, there’s also this very official looking banner and information in the body of the description that explains the hair is being sold for some kind of charity. The Make-A-Wish Foundation? They grant the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions to enrich the human experience with hope, strength and joy? Goddammit, now I’m the asshole.

This is just one heck of a tweet from Hanley Ramirez. You might notice that in the image above, the timing of the tweet mentions that it was twat “10 minutes ago,” and as of this writing, you might also notice, it’s now very much later than that. Well, I definitely saw this tweet ten minutes after it was posted, and even went so far as to capture and preserve it. So I want points for being on top of my shit. I just didn’t get around to commenting until now. I do not want points taken away for lateness.

Where to start with this? I am currently reading The Sound and the Fury, and I feel like this could very easily be a quotation from the opening section. It would be more convincing if it ended with “Then I cried,” but I’m not going to completely rule it out just yet. Seeing as I haven’t read very far in the text up to this point, I can neither confirm nor deny that Hanley Ramirez is quoting the 33 year-old mentally handicapped member of a dissolving Southern aristocracy portrayed in William Faulkner’s 1929 American literary classic. He could be, he could not be. I just don’t have the facts.

Later in the evening, this tweet begins to take on a rather prophetic tone, as we now know that Hanley is sort of unhappy with the Marlin’s signing of Jose Reyes, and more specifically what that signing means for his future defensive position. Hanley doesn’t want to play third base, they say, despite the fact that Ramirez has probably never been a competent shortstop with the glove and that Jose Reyes gives the Marlins a better chance at winning baseball games. Does nothing make Hanley happy, I wonder? He seems like a hard guy to please. Oh well.

And so I think the only real response to the question raised by Sir Hanley Ramirez in the above tweet is this: Yes Hanley, everyone it’s indeed waiting to see what’s going to happen with you or what you are going to do. Everyone it’s.